Paranoia
by Lynx Traveller
Summary: An AU horror fic I came up with late the other night. plz R&R.


Disclaimer: I don't own Beast wars, just this plot.

A/N are at the bottom this time.

I write this now, since I don't know if I'll get a chance later.

I know that my time is almost up, but I don't intend to go down without a fight.

This is a log of the happenings of the past months. If you're reading this, then it probably means that I'm dead.

My advice is to get out now; if you still have a ship, take it and get the slag out of here.

But I know that you won't. Your curiosity will be piqued; you'll stay until you can solve the mystery.

I suppose I should start at the beginning, but remember; you have been warned.

It all started about an Astral ago. I was branded a troublemaker; initially I was secretly praised by the Predacon alliance for my outspoken protests against Maximal tyranny, but later the alliance decided that I was too much of a loose cannon.

I'd always liked high stakes games, and I decided to risk everything in an all or nothing gamble.

If I was caught, I knew that I would be deactivated, and my existence covered up, completely erased from the history books.

But I felt that the benefits if I pulled it off would make it all worth it.

I broke into Iacon secretly with a team of mercenaries that I'd hired with promises of glory and wealth. Only one of them possibly guessed what my true intentions were, but the turncoat defected to the Maximals before he could cause a problem.

The plan was so simple; we would steal the golden disk and take the transwarp corvette that I'd acquired back to Earth at the beginning of the fourth Great War.

My crew were happy to believe that we were just after energon; if we brought enough of it back to finance a private war, then we could at least procure a small principality for ourselves. The others weren't even interested in that part of the cover story; they only wanted the energon.

The true plan was elegantly simple; I still can't believe that no one else thought of it.

There was a good bet that when the information on the disk would give the exact location of the Autobot ship, the _Ark._

With that knowledge I could wipe out the Maximals at their source and rule alongside my namesake in a marvellous Decepticon empire.

Anyway, I suppose I should get back to the point.

The plan wasn't quite as simple as I'd thought; the Maximal check-officer at the spaceport was too honest to take the bribe that I offered him, so I shot him and stuffed the body in an empty shipping crate. I'd figured that it would take time for them to find him, but I underestimated the nosiness of the docking crew.

Anyway, we were followed by an exploration vessel. Their ship was the type that was piloted by only a skeleton crew, with the rest of the task force in stasis in the cargo hold.

I assumed that they would be no match for our corvette and so I didn't take much notice of them. However, their ship had recently left an energon mining expedition and was well stocked, whereas mine was depleted from the transwarp jump. I guess that it was enough of a difference to even the score; we both shot the other down.

But I guess that if you'd read the ships log by now that you'd have gotten this much.

At first everything was straightforward; we warred for an upper hand, while I secretly decoded the disk. The battles were just a ruse to prevent the Maximals from guessing my intentions.

But after a few months, things started getting really weird.

First was Dinobot; he attacked our base late one night alone. We managed to detain him temporarily, but the vacant look in his optics was truly frightening.

He kept repeating over and over that he had to rectify the mistakes before something came. We tried to get him to explain what 'it' was, but every time it was mentioned he started screaming in agony and repeating the same thing over and over again.

Kill you all! It's coming!!! It's going to kill all of us!!!!!

I'll never forget that look in his optics as he thrashed around, oblivious to our presence.

We let him go, simply thinking that he was nuts; an insane bots just as dangerous to their friends as his enemies; let the Maximals deal with him.

Anyway, a few days later Tarantulas found a microscopic piece of armour. Scans revealed it to be from over his spark casing.

From the look of it, he'd stolen a large portion of the ships arsenal and tried to hold up somewhere. Apparently he'd wound up blowing up a sizable part of a forest in an attempt to get whatever phantom was chasing him. From the looks of it he'd then strapped the remaining explosives to himself and jumped off a cliff.

Initially we thought that that was the end of it; Dinobot had simply gone insane, but it didn't stop there.

One of their new recruits, Tigertron, was found a few weeks later in the middle of a massive energon deposit that had exploded. We'd thought that the idiot had set it off accidentally, but when we recovered his hard drive, we found recordings of his last few moments.

From the way that the camera was jumping around, it looked like he was running. Gathering from the amount of times that he stumbled we guessed that he was running panicked.

He kept screaming something about something trying to get him. The recording from his optics showed that he kept glancing back as he ran, trying to see an invisible force.

Finally he found the energon deposit and rammed his melee weapon into an outcropping. Assumedly anything was better than being caught by whatever was chasing him.

Again, we just thought that he'd gotten over energised and committed suicide. Two Maximals down had to be a good thing.

But it went deeper than that.

Our outpost cameras found Cheetor out in an energon storm firing up at phantoms in the clouds. He soon just gave up and threw his gun away, spreading his arms wide as if he was trying to fly.

He held that pose until he was struck by lightning.

Most of my crew were on edge now; most didn't want to go out on patrol in case they came across the Maximals. I forced them out each day, but I wish now that I hadn't.

Airazor was found a few days later. Apparently the cycle was broken; instead of committing suicide to keep away from an invisible force, she was found partially eaten.

About this time we realised that Rattrap hadn't been seen for a while. Several outpost cameras showed shots of a hulking creature moving at night. It was impossible to tell if it was him or not because it looked horribly mutated. Even still it moved sort of like him.

Most of the Predacons who went out on patrol returned screaming and saying that they'd seen something. We put together a hunting party to get the fugitive rat.

We found him out in the rain, he didn't look any different than he usually did, but he had the same glazed look to his optics and was blindly walking around bumping into trees as if in a daze.

Terrorsaurs shot caught him through the base of the neck; by the time that we'd gotten close enough to interrogate him he'd meched to death from the gaping wound.

After that we'd thought that it was all over; morale began to rise again, and bots weren't as scared of going out on patrol.

After a few months though we realised that we hadn't seen any sign of the remaining Maximals. Again a party was put together to find them, starting at their base.

The inside was vastly different from what we'd expected; for one thing there was absolutely no power; a ships reactor usually went critical if it was discharged completely, but there was nothing there.

The inside of the ship was all dark; without even backup lights, strange plant life had begun to grow.

There were what looked like cobwebs everywhere; I suspected Tarantulas, but when we shone light on them they crumbled to dust. They were also immensely strong, and looked almost as if they were made of a rust-like substance.

We finally found what remained of the crew; Silverbolt was in what must've been his quarters with a shotgun barrel in what had been his mouth. Rhinox was slumped over his computer; he bore no physical evidence to why his spark was extinguished. We managed to restore power to the computer with a portable power cell, but the results weren't encouraging.

What was written on the screen seemed to be scrambled; there were photos of what looked like a cave with strange writing etched into it. We managed to decode only a few words, but what we found was straight out of a horror movie.

Then we found Optimus.

Actually, we'd been wondering what had happened to him, but we finally realised what the crunching noise was underfoot.

Someone had torn him apart. But rather than just stopping at that, they'd made sure that no single piece of his carapace was bigger than a few square millimetres. The entire ship was basically paved with an even layer of these armour fragments.

The rest of my crew fled at that point. I waited just long enough to get a copy of what was on the computer screen, and then I joined them.

Most of the crew were spooked badly. Waspinator was visibly shaking, and most of the others had their weapons in hand and were jumping at shadows.

A few weeks later, nothing out of the ordinary had happened. We figured that the Maximals had just gotten paranoid and killed each other. The evidence didn't really support that theory, but none of us wanted to think of any other explanation.

Waspinator and Quickstrike were out on a long range scouting mission to find energon. Quickstrike came running in, armour badly ripped across his face like he'd been running through a forest. He had similar cuts everywhere, and was meching from several of the larger ones. His knees were badly dented and half the plating on the soles of his feet were torn off. It looked like he'd run the whole way back, tripping over various things in the dark.

He was babbling incoherently; none of us could make any words out. When we asked about Waspinator, all his did was hand over a small piece of yellow carapace with a tiny bit of black in one corner.

We quickly put Quickstrike in the CR tank, but he terminated some time through the night. The computer scans showed that everything went properly, but some time in the early hours of the morning he simply flat-lined.

An autopsy revealed nothing out of the ordinary, except for a tiny organism spore lodged in a cut in his neck.

We all treated ourselves with an anti-fungal solution and locked down the base so that nothing could get in or out. 

Quickstrikes body was incinerated in the lava pits.

Whilst we were locked away in the base we used the camera towers and an adaptation of Tarantulas' spiderbots to scout the area.

Again, it seemed to work for a few weeks but then the cameras started to go down unexplainably. The spiderbots seemed to cease working after travelling a certain distance from the base.

Again, we thought it possible that more of the spores had gotten into the equipment. We welded all the air vents shut and completely sealed ourselves in. A total radiation sterilisation of the base made sure that any remaining spores would be destroyed.

As usual, it seemed to work for a short while, but then the power started getting low; no one had collected energon in a while and so all non-essential systems were shut down, including the security system.

That was when the trouble really started.

All we ever found of Scorponok was a mech smear down one wall. We did a full sensor sweep of the base but nothing else could be found.

We tried to restart the security system, but it was completely fused. The dust on the consoles hadn't been disturbed since we'd shut everything down.

Terrorsaur cracked at this and blasted a hole in one of the corridors before escaping into the rain. We didn't bother chasing him, but he never came back, so either he walled himself up somewhere and is still alive, or if he went mad like the others and terminated himself I guess I'll never know. That's a mystery for you to answer dear reader.

We sealed the hole up again, but we didn't bother decontaminating the place; obviously it wasn't the spores, which means that I'm all out of ideas as to the cause.

Most of the remaining crew simply huddled together in the ships common room, too afraid to venture out. 

Then one day Blackarachnia simply got up and walked out. We heard a scream, but we were too afraid to check it out.

There were three of us left by now, paranoia gripped all of us. We'd come to only trust ourselves, in case it was one of us who had done away with the others; it was the only logical conclusion since nothing else could have caused it.

Tarantulas went off on his own, taking a sizable amount of weaponry. He'd muttered something about not trusting either of us and that he'd take his chances on his own. We hadn't tried to follow, but several of the passages leading to his quarters were found to be wired and mined.

Luckily neither of us were injured, but it proved that the spider was serious.

This is all the events up to this time. Inferno still insists on watching over me, but neither of us takes our eyes off the other, nor our hands off our weapons.

And this is how I leave you. Inferno is sitting opposite from me, his optics a dim shade due to lack of power. We haven't heard from Tarantulas in almost a month. If we don't find an end to this soon, we're all gonna starve to death.

Captains log, Republic cruiser _Harms Way._

The recovery mission to the Axalons beacon has revealed nothing. We recovered the Predacon commander's diary, and quite frankly, I'm shocked at the content. My second doesn't believe a word of it, and I've ordered that the rest of the crew don't know about it; the last thing that I need is a bunch of spooked officers.

The trouble is that everything that is in the diary has been accounted for. My second claims that there's another explanation for it all, and that the diary is just one way of viewing it all.

I hope he's right, but even still a priority quarantine has been issued for that planet; no one is to go there until a full investigation has taken place.

We did find the one referred to as Terrorsaur; he was found at the bottom of a ravine with his wings torn off. It looked like he'd climbed to a great height and simply dove into the ground at full speed, his wings being torn off by the air resistance.

As for the tyrant and his remaining crew, several of my troops were injured by the wire traps trying to get to the sectioned off parts of the ship.

Our re-creation theorists have pieced together the final moments of the crew as this; the one known as Inferno was found slumped over his fallen leader with a large hole through his chest. The spider's head was found in the corner of the room. It appears that it was Inferno the whole time; somehow he managed to leave, kill the spider, then came back to attack his leader. Megatron shot him in self-defence, but not before he'd lunged at the tyrant and crushed his spark casing in on itself.

The final analysis is that a mixture of paranoia, madness, and cabin fever convinced the crew that the others were all insane. In self-defence, most killed the otherwise innocent crewmembers before they could get them first.

As I mentioned before, none of this had been allowed to leave my quarters; only my second and third, as well as the theorists know of what's happened. All have been sworn to secrecy.

The funny thing is that a few cycles ago I received a report that one of the technicians down on E deck had been in a fatal accident. Witnesses reported this bot swinging a large piece of pipe in the air as if trying to ward something off and wound up backing up to and falling over a rail and into the number three reactor.

The strangest part is that earlier this morning I'd personally interviewed this bot about a harassment report that he'd filed. He claimed that someone was stalking him, but he had no idea who it could have been.

So, what did you think? Initially I'd planned for the bots to be killed off by one of their own number, Inferno was to be protecting Megatron against Tarantulas, who they'd deduced was at fault.

Then Tarantulas was to be found dead with Inferno standing over him…

But, I don't mind how it turned out in the end.

Anyway, click on the review button and tell me what you think.


End file.
